Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

...for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same—and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike but stripped of these things they were kin.

...if he survived this fall, he should ask his children to promise to make a pyre of his books when he did die, and what a site that would be. The fire, a beacon announcing his death, might be visible as far as the Isle of Wight.

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Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements...Manufacturers said they needed tax breaks and public-money...Banks and financiers needed looser regulations...Employers said they needed weaker unions...Everybody...said they needed lower taxes....and they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get?Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs.

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#fridayreads

#fridayreads "no tool is neutral and that people moving into a new space are unlikely to shed their old beliefs and habits— even the destructive ones."

#fridayreads "It amuses me to think of the miles that well-thumbed book had travelled, satisfying the curiosity of readers around the county, enabled by the library system."

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"The opposite of melancholy is fierce, bright delirium." (The Fever Librarian)

#fridayreads "A war like that is a stigma that takes...centuries to disappear...it contains everything and debases everything...it was like removing the mask of civilization that all presentable nations wear..which allows them to pretend. Pretending is essential if we are to live together, to prosper and progress, and here, where we've seen the criminals' true faces, seen what happened, pretense is impossible."

“Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse."

#fridayreads "...“add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life.”

(Cole describing President Barack Obama comparing him to Jefferson and Lincoln as "readers in chief".)

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about...He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make on listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

Painters know that everything is a combination of what’s observed, what’s imagined, what’s overheard, and what’s been done before. Is Monet a nonfiction painter and Ingres a fiction painter? It’s the least illuminating thing we could ask about their works. Some lean more heavily on what’s seen, some more on what’s imagined, but all draw on various sources.”

#fridayreads "“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

…five of my high school classmates, met Senator Trent Lott. My schoolmates were white. I was not. Trent Lott took a whip as long as a car off his office table…and said to my one male schoolmate who grinned at Lott enthusiastically: Let’s show ’em how us good old boys do it. And then he swung that whip through the air and cracked it above our heads, again and again. I remember the experience in my bones.”

(from Borsay): "Image is about power. Those who can control the way a place is represented can control the place itself."

“They didn’t have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.”

"I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them. Do they know what communism is?"

"I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them. Do they know what communism is?"

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You are afraid our bodies will fail us, and of what you call the ugliness of age, even though you are more beautiful now than you were at twenty-three. We’re not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What’s so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age.

You are afraid our bodies will fail us, and of what you call the ugliness of age, even though you are more beautiful now than you were at twenty-three. We’re not old because we are seventy. We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What’s so bad about that? Love and friendship do not

"A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious."

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I think it would be well, and proper...to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp... Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

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